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Sanitary Doily gets its 15 minutes

5/31/2013

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PictureSanitary Doily, a finalist in the City's sewer-cover competition.
I'm deluded enough to believe I can survive on an art practice in Vancouver but I am under no illusion that my Sanitary Doily will be selected to grace the city's sanitary sewer covers for the next century.

But I couldn't resist designing my tribute to a traditional handmade use-object's chief function: to conceal and pretty-up unsightly evidence of everyday life. Sanitary Doily is a stink bid but damn if it didn't make it as a finalist among the more than 1,000 entries in the City's open competition.

The design borrows from actual patterns, with the swirling core used here to convey a flushing toilet action. (In retrospect, the swirl should be reversed. This is not Australia.) The surrounding negative spaces are reshaped as random water droplets while just managing to maintain pattern integrity. It is intended to be whimsically informative, enhanced by the prominent inclusion of the City of Vancouver into the lacework. It is conceived as an imperfect, pleasing intervention in a manufactured landscape.

Just what two designs will be selected for the storm sewer and sanitary sewer covers will be announced this Saturday afternoon, June 1, at the Ironclad Art Manhole Design Challenge exhibit at the  Interurban Gallery, 1 East Hastings at Carrall Street. (The exhibit of all design entries is now on display through June 8, 1-5 p.m. where you can vote for your favourite, or do that here.)

I did a little fisty air punch when I was notified that Sanitary Doily was not rejected out of hand, mainly because I see it as a small victory in our culture where exquisitely handmade lacework can be found heaped in plastic bins at local thrift shops, at 50 cents each. I know how much dedication is required to make a doily because after decades of practice I can just manage to crochet a crude one. To me, the way we treat those little spiderwebby lace fragments of yore is symbolic of the level of honour and value attributed to that last generation of women who mastered that domestic art form. Not so much.

PictureImage from junk-culture.com
Doilies are just another kind of mark-making, albeit traditionally in the home, so naturally I adore New York City crochet artist Nathan Vincent's crocheted manhole-cover, which makes its mark in the streets. (See more of his manly crocheted objects here.)

Meanwhile, I'm left thinking about what's next for Sanitary Doily. It won't be cast in iron any time soon, but I'm kind of loving the idea of re-injecting it with a little of the original use-object value, like Brooklyn artist Ronda Smith's NYC sewer cover throw pillows. (Or maybe it's just her pitch I love: "Who wants to snuggle up to a SMALL NYC SEWER manhole cover??? I DO!!"

Her series of domestic artworks are photo transfers of actual sewers but thanks to the wonders of Photoshop — and my Photoshop wiz of a brother — I could fudge the whole thing (see below).  

Admittedly, a Sanitary Doily pillow wouldn't have the power of her iconic, beat-up photographed objects. And anyway, I would be more inclined to turn the image into a toilet seat cover.
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Image from Etsy.com
In the end, its actual use is more likely to be another sample of work for this website.

Good enough!
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Thinking outside the rain barrel

5/24/2013

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I can barely remember this city before community gardens. They're so integral to my neighbourhood, and I don't even have a plot of my own.

Aside from the obvious benefit of providing people ways to grow their own food, community gardens are also spaces of engagement, contemplation and innovation that attracts people of all ages like bees.

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Which is why I was so taken by one Industrial Design student's final project at Emily Carr University's grad show last week.

Theunis Snyman has taken on the city-issue rain barrel in a poetic re-think of our weird watering ways in this watery part of the world.

The green poly rain barrel is designed to connect to downspouts to divert 341 litres of water away from the storm sewers for use in outdoor plants and lawns. Trouble is, that system isn't too useful when it comes to watering community gardens. You could stick one of the rain barrels out there on the land to catch the water directly out of the sky but the downspout hole is too small to collect much rain, and there's also the problem of overflow.

The South African-born Snyman might just have the answer, in the Utixo Kinetic Rain Harvester, named after the Bushman rain god in South Africa. Four petals made from reclaimed materials 

act as funnels for rain into the rain barrel. According to the promotional materials at the show: "as the tank fills, an interior float mechanism closes the petals/leaves to stop the harvesting process. As the rain barrel is drained, the float moves down and pulls open the flower again, ready to receive replenishment."
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No batteries, no high technology, no noise — just a lovely example of sculptural form meeting simple function in this part art installation, part garden innovation. An accompanying image (at left) at the graduation show reveals the sculptural beauty of the enhanced rain barrels in action here in Vancouver.





As if we need another reason to get back to the gardens:

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Sticking it to The Man sticks with me

5/17/2013

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Touring the Emily Carr University graduation show (aka The Show) can be exhausting. There’s work by more than 300 grads packed into those halls and classrooms — too much to take in just one visit. The best I could manage last week was a scan of the lay of the land. Among the standouts was Emily Carr University graduate Kaveh Irani's Politicians Can, part of his Can Series.
Because who doesn’t love finely rendered portraiture on aluminum pop cans, especially when they’re of Kim Jong-un and Stalin, wrapped up in the Coca-Cola logo?

I’m a sucker for culture-jamming, the only real sacred cow in our secular world. Quebecois may still take the Catholic Church in vain, and English Canada still swears about sex, but today’s taboos are legally protected brands.  You really want to raise some eyebrows? Use multinationals’ logos for your own unlicensed purposes. Yeah, I said it.
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PictureImage from kojitstudio.com


You can run around with hard core porn in your pocket, or post picture of priests exploring each other’s bodies but it is risky business to dis Dow Chemicals. (As a reporter I once received a warning letter from Dow legal advising me that the newspaper could avoid being hit with further action if I completed and returned a questionnaire that would indicate I understood the difference between Styrofoam and “polystyrene product.” I complied and remained employed.) 

Not surprisingly Messing with the Man (and his money and power) remains the top hot-button in these parts, which would explain why 50 per cent of Facebook activity appears to be posts of images like this one:

(The other 50 per cent is sharenting.)
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PictureImage from wackypackages.org



A 1973 New York Magazine connects Wacky Packages to cynical '70s kids.

BF (before Facebook) we had Wacky Packages. Damn I wish I still had my Wacky Packs but what eight-year-old kid could resist peeling off these sick send-ups and sticking it to the Man? We had no idea who Art Spiegelman was but the creepy graphics looked enough like Mad Magazine and Cracked that kids swarmed the corner stores for the latest gum-laced Topps packages. (Got 'em, got 'em, got 'em, got 'em, need 'em, need 'em, got 'em….)

Suddenly we held this power of counterpoint to all the commercials in our hot little hands, and the urge to disseminate that sentiment on street sign poles, all over our plastic lunch kits and the back of bus seats. Even eight-year-olds can't unlearn this kind of early social awareness. So it is with a note of nostalgia that I gravitate toward the Art Spiegelman show currently at the Vancouver Art Gallery (CO-MIX: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps, to June 9)

And that's why the Kim Jong-Un can at the Emily Carr grad show had me at hello. The combo of the purported drink of the death squads and dictator over actual death squads is powerful stuff indeed. The contrast between finely detailed painting on a throwaway object also needles nicely. It takes guts to go low at a grad show.

So much to see, The Show wraps up this Sunday at ECUAD on Granville Island. 
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Garden art beyond the whirlygigs

5/10/2013

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I know I should be researching or finishing or conceiving or cleaning or thanking or discussing or working on proposals. But like everyone else in the northern Northern Hemisphere, I can barely remain indoors these fine days. Because — and I hate to be the bearer of bad news here  — the days will be getting shorter in six weeks. The time to make a break for it is NOW. Out, into the city gardens and the public beaches and the urban forests.
You know you're aching to get going/growing when you and your artist friends are more enthused about a trip to Home Depot for potting soil than an art show opening. You know it when your desktop is suddenly stacked with images of art that lives outdoors, in the midst of natural and tended landscapes. We want to make, we want to be inspired but mostly we want it to all happen out there. 

Artists' gardens I have known may be overgrown shambles or even slightly freaky spaces but they are never manicured hedges and putting greens. They are spaces of adventure and surprise and they take me back to my artist father's East Van oasis, where my brother and I would get lost in the winding path that held treasures like his concrete head planters with greenery erupting out of the heads like Sideshow Bob hair. Artist gardens often have the feel of public art spaces in miniature, spaces of experimentation with form and materials, maquettes for possible large-scale works.
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The discovery of these tiny simple sculptures in a garden would create surprise through unexpected form and the power of multiples, while referencing their particular space.
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Having just finished a course in public art I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes garden art successful. Stuffing the space with curios feels like a clutter problem on summer migration. (The large-scale version of that is the charity eagle/bear/orca sculpure...thingies. Even monumental bronzes of horse-mounted Lords on expansive rolling lawns can be overlooked because they don't resonate.)

It's the site specificity and the element of surprise that makes any outdoor space sing, whether that's in the use of materials and scale, like the giant pinecones (above) that Ontario metal artist Floyd Elzinga fabricates from shovels, or the juxtaposition of the object and the natural surroundings, like the firepit below. (I'm filing this mass-produced, buy-online item, credited only to "an artist" in Tennessee, under Accidental Art.)

It's something to contemplate while I look at all the unidentifiable weedy things already going to seed in my little space. 

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This globe fire pit will not be ignored  — not because of scale or materials but concept. That and the scary inferno.

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This hose topiary references its particular space through use of materials and is just weird enough that it works for me. (Artist's name lost in the Pinterest jungle.)

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Ask not why the giant doily

5/2/2013

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After a long and often painful labour, I’m happy to introduce…the twins!

I’m not sure why I plumped up the two eight-foot-wide doilies, freshly completed today, for their first picture. It might have something to do with this morning’s mammogram.

‘Why’ is always a scary question wherever conception is concerned. ‘What’ and ‘how’ are a little more manageable.

What they are are two crocheted doilies on a scale of 1 inch = 1 foot, using a material that mimics the relative volume, appearance and weight of the cotton floss called for in the original patterns for the two table-top doilies I found in my stack of 1950s homemaker magazines.

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What material was a tough enough question without the Why lurking behind. I’d been searching for the right stuff for ages until I realized it was all around me. In fact, I’d been hammering cedar shingles into it for weeks at a time last summer: Tyvek exterior building wrap. I pushed the Why away as I special-ordered a 100-yard bolt of the wrap.

The size of the doilies was determined by the biggest crochet hook I could get my hands on (and could handle). After making several swatches I finally decided two-inch strips were sufficiently doilyish.

Scraping up any residual knowledge of basic math that has clung to my grey matter, I have conjured up this probably-incorrect calculation of length of materials used, in answer to the What:

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36 inches (1 yard width) ÷ 2-inch strips = 18 strips x 60 inches (length) = 1080 linear inches per yard x 95 yards (100-yard bolt minus remaining five yards) = 102,600 linear inches ÷ 12 inches = 8,550 feet ÷ 2 doilies = 4,275 linear feet per doily. (I love how stats can be simultaneously unfathomable and banal.)
How did I know how to make doilies? Let me count the ways in all those crappy/crafty afghans, potholders, slippers, placemats, doll clothes, stuffed animals, toques, nerdy vests and that abortion of a bikini.

Why the giant doily, you/I insist? Because it was there, in my head. I conceived two to enjoy their similarities and their differences.

Go forth, twins! Find your purpose! Write if you get a show! And don’t let the why-ers get you down!

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